How much power do the Athlon XP's need ?

T

The Greater God

New member
I'm upgrading to a ECS K7S6A which features the SiS745 chipset. At first, I thought all I would need would be my processor, motherboard, cooling system, and maybe some new IDE cables, but I did some reading and people are saying you need a +400watt power supply ?!?!! I can't afford all this at the moment. Can anyone confirm or deny this ? This upgrade will go into my dell 300mhz system which is running just fine on a 200w power supply. How much power do you all think I'll be needing for this AMD system ? How much can I get by with ? I also plan on using a peltier kit for cooling the proc.

Thanks
 
You definitely won't be able to get by on that 200w power supply. You could probably get by with a 300w or 350w, but you really don't want to scrimp on your power supply. Using a cheap power supply, or an underpowered one, can lead to ambiguous system failures as different devices fight for power. If you're using a peltier, it also uses up power. Do yourself a favor and save up for a nice power supply.
 
I agree with Elevate and suggest you get at least a 300 watt supply, just for safety sake. Although, when I put my new Dual Althon system together a little while back, I was using a 350W Enermax supply with 2 XP1700s, 3 hard drives, 2 CD drives, floppy drive, sound card, ATA RAID card, USB card, and video card. No problems whatsoever. I only recently upgraded to a 430 Watt supply because I was looking to quiet things down a bit with the Enermax 'Whisper' PSU.

You may get away with your old 200 watt supply, but you could end up with strange quirky errors.

A good 350 watt supply will only run between $40-$50, so you might just want to save yourself a possible headache.
 
The power supply is the cheapest possible part, I don't know why that's a budget breaker for you. But if it is, wait a month, and scrimp and save. Last thing you want is to spend a bunch of cash and have your system be unusable.
 
I can't say for sure on the ECS k7s6a board, but the K7s5a's reccommened minimum rails for voltage require at least a 350watt supply... there are a few 300watts that meet them but barely. I have a 300watt and had to take a stick of ram out until I can get a bigger supply when I put this board in cause my rails aren't even close to being whats needed so anytime that 2nd stick would kick in (plugins, games) my system would freeze from lack of power.
 
I have to say that I have never heard of needing a bigger power supply just for RAM - I would assume the power requirements for RAM are very minimal. Hard drives on the other hand will most definately suck major juice.

I have always gotten by fine on a 300 watt, you can find them for about $25-$35.

Jdechant - as you may have seen, I recently posted a thread about my search for a new Athlon motherboard, and highly unpleasent experiances with a pair of the K7S5A motherboards ( http://www.homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?threadid=46404 ). I must confess that through hours of fighting with these damn boards it never even occured to me that my 300 watt power supply would be too wimpy, and might have been the source of my grief. Where did you get your figures for the minimum recomended power?
 
Whatever you do,DO NOT try to run that new xp on that small power supply.If you do,I can guarantee what will happen.It may run fine for awhile,a few months even,then it will BLOW UP IN YOUR FACE!
The reason I know this is my last computer ran for about 8 months and then self destructed.It took out the hard drive,cdrw,floppy,mobo and the video card.My mistake was upgrading from a k62 450 to an athlon 800 mhz t-bird without getting a new power supply.The new one called for 250 watts minimum.The specs listed in the book that came with my original system from Nimbletech(now out of business)listed a 250 watt supply.It wasn't until I was dissaassembling the charred remains that I discovered that I had a 200 watt max supply.
Before you bulid,check this page AMD reccomended power supplies

Good luck!
 
RWhite...

No I did not see your post... I went to and read over it and you have the same symtoms as I did and many others that I read about. Games freezing up the system... on mine anytime I'd run an audio plugin in real time it would yak too. I gathered from your thread that you had two SDRAM modules in...

yes that would have pushing the 300watt supply to the point it would have dropped the crutial rails the CPU needs low enough to cause the CPU to fail. Sounds strange but many people over look this and as a result bad mouth the ECS SiS boards. I took a stick of RAM out for now so I am running happy as a bird. I'll put the other one back in once I get a PSU bigger than 300watts.

Sorry I didn't see your other post or else we might've been able to avoid all that headache.

On the big sticker on the side of your PSU you want to mainly be concerned with the +3.3V and +5V outputs (or rails). Minimum required ratings for the ECS K7S5A are 24A on the +3.3V rail and 28A on the +5.0V rail. On an average 300watt PSU that ratings are 14A on the +3.3V and 22A on the +5V rails.... not neerly enough as you can see. That is the easiest way to see if your PSU will work with the ECS K7S5A board.

much more info and the complete K7S5A PSU FAQ is here:
http://www.ocworkbench.com/articles/psu/psup1.htm

sorry I could not have been of some assitance sooner to you RWhite.
 
Well! all bbs crashing done, I can get back on now...

Jdechant - you theory about power is very interesting, although I'm not sure that was the case with me. I had a new 300 watt PS (with the P4 connectors) and while I did not suspect power, at one point I did remove my two 256 meg DIMMS and replace them with a single 128 DIMM. No difference. Also the fact that games would crash on startup sounds more like a direct X issue to me, probably with audio. Although at this point I'm really open to any explaination, including posession by Aliens.

I've pretty much given up on upgrading my main system, I've invested too much time in setting up XP on my old P3. However I've decide that my Ego requires one more try, so I'm going to look for another Athlon mobo this weekend (probably a Gigabyte KT-133a based board) and install it into yet another PC box I have lieing arround for gaming. No Silicon piece of s%#t is going to get the best of me!
 
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